by Rod Walker
“Don’t remind me,” said Corbin. “There are a lot of ways this could go wrong, but I can’t think of anything better. I say we do it.”
“Very well,” said Hawkins. “Were any of the environmental techs with you?”
“No,” said Corbin. “Looks like they’re all on the crew deck. Rodriguez!” Arthur hurried over, still carrying his laptop. “You hear all that?”
“Some of it,” said Arthur, looking pretty nervous for a guy who’d single-handedly killed six armored commandos.
“You’ve got the most experience on the environmental systems, so take over,” he said, pointing at the life support console.
“I’m a cargo specialist,” said Arthur. “If I screw up, I could kill them all.”
“Think of it as unloading human cargo,” said Corbin.
“My point is that you have more experience with the enviro systems than I do,” said Arthur.
“This is why we cross-train,” said Corbin. “I would do it, but I need to be elsewhere. I wouldn’t ask you to do it unless I was certain you could manage it. You were cool under much worse pressure in the cargo bay. You can do this.”
Arthur nodded, seeming to recover his confidence. Buthe had only been responsible for his own life in the cargo bay. Here would have the lives of over one hundred men in his hands.
Yeah, I see how he could get nervous.
“Where are you going?” said Hawkins.
“With your permission, I will lead an attack to seize control of the engineering room,” said Corbin. “We can’t let Ducarti stabilize the reactor, and even if that is not his objective, we need to keep him occupied and prevent him from reaching the troopship.”
“I should be the one to go,” said Hawkins. “With Williams turned traitor, I’m in command of this ship.”
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t go,” said Corbin. “If I’m killed, someone will have to take charge, and someone needs to stay here on the bridge and coordinate now that we have communications back.”
Hawkins hesitated, but not for long. “All right. That’s your job, then. Go to the engineering section and take it back. Clear out the remaining Socials and stop whatever they’re trying to do.” He exhaled and shook his head. “And try to stop the hypermatter reactor from blowing up, will you? We need it to get home.”
“Aye aye,Skipper,” said Corbin.
“Take whoever you need with you,” said Hawkins, standing a little taller, “and whatever weapons you want.”
“Right,” said Corbin. “Murdock, stay here with Rodriguez. Make sure everything goes well on the crew deck. Nelson, you’re with me. Pick out fifteen men, and as many weapons as we can carry.” Nelson nodded in his customarily unfazed manner and started choosing men, assigning them the weapons captured from the slain Social Party commandos. “Nikolai, you’re with me.”
“Me?” I said, surprised.
“You’ve kept your head in a firefight,” said Corbin. “Twice now. Not many men can say that. I know I can count on you.”
A surge of pride went through me. I was tired and sore, and my head and neck and back hurt from the battering they had taken. I really, really wanted to go lie down someplace and sleep for a month, and I desperately wished that I had never seen Alesander Ducarti ever again.
But I would not have traded that moment for anything.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Corbin smiled at me. “Get some reloads from Nelson.”
My machine pistol was almost empty, but as it turned out, reloading it proved no great challenge. The commandos had been armed to the teeth, and we had taken enough weapons and ammunition to conquer a small colony, or at least a mid-sized space station. Now that the ship’s systems were partially unlocked, our comms worked again, so Nelson distributed earpieces, pairing them to our devices and locking them into a private channel. Williams would be able to listen in, if he happened to think of it, but the encryption on the private channel would keep him from understanding any of it.
“All right, men, listen up,” said Nelson. “We’re going to go take back our engineering room from the Socials. Mr. Rovio has a plan. Corbin?”
“We’ve got the internal sensors and security grid back,” said Corbin, “so we can at least see what’s going on. Nikolai? Bring up the view from the engineering room, please.”
I nodded, walked to the sensor console, and tapped some keys. The air over the bridge’s main holographic projector flickered, and a hazy black-and-white image from the engineering room’s security camera appeared. The Rusalka’s internal sensors could pick up infrared, weapons traces, and radiation leaks, but for all that, the internal cameras were low-resolution, and there was only one camera in the engineering room. I supposed Starways had to cut costs somewhere. Nevertheless, in the hazy image, I could count eleven armored commandos standing guard over the consoles.
I couldn’t see Ducarti or Williams anywhere. Though given how little of the engineering room the camera covered, that didn’t mean anything.
“They’ve got a good defensive position,” Nelson observed.
“Yes,” said Corbin, “but they’re all clustered in the engineering room. According to the internal sensors, none of them have gotten into the surrounding maintenance walkways, including the crawlway that runs over the top of the room. We’ll send a man above to drop a few stun grenades into the engineering room. Once they’re incapacitated, we’ll storm the room.”
Suddenly I realized why my uncle wanted me to come along. There were occasional downsides to being young and skinny.
“That should work,” said Nelson. “So long as they don’t spot the man infiltrating.”
“We need to do it as soon as possible. The longer they’re are in the engineering room, the longer they have to make trouble. If we retake the engineering room and take them out, I can stabilize the hypermatter react and we all live to go home. Any objections?”
No one had any.
“XO,” said Corbin. “How are things on the crew deck?”
“Murdock,” said Hawkins.
Murdock stood next to Arthur, who sat at the life support control console, typing furiously. “I’ve gotten in touch with the men on the crew decks. They’ve taken cover, and we’ve sealed the doors. I don’t think the Socials on the crew deck have realized it yet. Hopefully they won’t figure out what we’re doing until Rodriguez here has finished pumping all the air out of the corridors.”
“You’ve still got the radio we took from the dead commando’s helmet?” said Corbin.
“Right here,” said Murdock. He glanced at the dead commandos, who had been unceremoniously dumped against the wall to keep them out of the way. “I know where we can get a few more, too.”
“Keep an eye on them,” said Corbin. “Once they realize what we’ve done, get in touch and offer them a chance to surrender. I don’t want to risk them going berserk and blowing holes in the side of the ship. Give them good terms—we’ll dump them on the first inhabitable planet we find and go on our way.”
I frowned. “After everything they’ve done?”
Corbin shrugged. “Best to leave the enemy a chance to escape, if necessary.”
“There’s no way to escape from the engineering room,” said Nelson.
“I know,” said Corbin. “Which is why this will be a hard fight. It’s time to move out. Nikolai…”
“Take the stun grenades?” I said.
He blinked in surprise, then nodded again. “You’re the best man for the job. I’ll need you to climb into the maintenance walkways above the engineering room and drop the grenades. Once they go off, we’ll charge the room and attack. With luck, we can clear them out without taking too many casualties.”
“And Ducarti and the captain?” said Nelson.
“Take them alive if you can,” said Corbin. “And if not well, they had their chance. It’s time to go.”
“I’ll coordinate from here,” said Hawkins. “Good luck.” He turned back to Arthur’s console.
One of the techs handed me a tool bag. It currently held no tools, but instead contained eight stun grenades the commandos had carried onto the Rusalka. I nodded my thanks, slung the bag’s strap across my chest, checked the safety on my machine pistol and the ammunition on my belt, and followed the others from the bridge. The blast doors slid shut behind us with an ominous clang, which seemed like a bad omen. Still, if this went bad, at least Ducarti and his surviving troops would not be able to break back into the bridge to take control of the ship.
We walked down the corridor in silence. Far at the other end of the dorsal corridor, I saw the opened doors to the engineering room. I wondered why the commandos beyond them did not open fire. They had a clear shot all the way up the dorsal corridor. Nelson kept us moving along the walls, ready to take cover in the other doorways should the enemy open up. I felt sweat trickling down my back beneath my jumpsuit and vacuum suit. Why weren’t the commandos in the engineering room opening fire? It would have been so easy to pin us down.
“Nikolai,” said Corbin, pointing at the side of the corridor. We had reached the navigation observation lounge, the very place where I had followed Murdock into the maintenance walkways. Further down the corridor would be the airlocks where the troop transport and the Vanguard would have docked with the Rusalka. An idea occurred to me.
“Why don’t we take over the Vanguard?” I said. “Or the troop ship? Either one would keep Ducarti from getting away and leaving the ships to blow.”
“A good idea,” said Corbin, “but it looks like the Socials sealed both doors behind them. Both are connected to the Rusalka with an airlock, and if we used the kind of equipment we’d need to cut through their blast doors, we would likely rip open the tunnels to vacuum. No, we’d best regain control of the Rusalka first, and then deal with the other ships.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll head for the maintenance walkways now.”
“Nikolai,” said Corbin quietly. I paused, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m not going to say that your mother and father would be proud of you, because we both know they would not approve of what you have done. But that, I think, is the highest praise I can give you.”
I grinned. “Mom would have been furious.” My smile faded. “But maybe if Sergei had known the truth about Ducarti, maybe that would have changed his mind.”
“Maybe,” said Corbin. “If nothing else, we can avenge them. Good luck, Niko.”
“You too,” I said, and I took a firm grip on the grenade bag before entering the observation lounge.
The panel where Murdock and I had fled earlier was still loose, and it was no trouble to pry it off and move it aside. I climbed into the narrow passage and started down it, the boots of my suit clanking against the metal grill floor. I would head up to the next level, to the crawlway that wedged between the outer and inner hulls. From there I would make my way to the platform above the engineering room.
“Nikolai?” crackled Corbin’s voice in my ear.
“I hear you,” I said, making my way along, the bag of stun grenades thumping against me with every step. I slipped my machine pistol out of its holster, checked the safety, and kept it ready in my right hand. “I’ll send a text when I’m in position.” I didn’t dare speak once I was in the crawlspace over the engineering room. The sound might reach the ears of the commandos, and then they would need only to send a few volleys of bullets into the ceiling to deal with me.
“Go as fast as you can,” said Corbin. “We’re in position. I expect the commandos know we’re here, and the longer we wait, the more likely it is Ducarti will decide to start something.”
“Roger,” I said, stopping at the base of a ladder cylinder. “I’m climbing into the crawlspace. Going dark now.”
I muted my mike and started up the ladder, trying to keep quiet. I doubted that anyone in the engineering room would be able to hear me from this distance, but it was best to be careful. I went up the ladder rung by careful rung, then slowly stuck my head into the crawlway.
That saved my life.
The maintenance crawlway was a narrow tunnel about four feet in diameter, the walls and ceiling lined with pipes and bundles of wires. The first thing I saw was the sleek black shape of a security drone just to the right of the ladder cylinder, clinging to the ceiling overhead. The gun turret on the metal spider’s back started to turn, the barrel of its weapon swinging towards me.
I reacted on pure instinct. I couldn’t get my gun up in time to fire, so I didn’t even try. Instead I pulled myself up the ladder, slamming into the wall, and the barrel of the turret gun whacked across my chest.
That hurt. A lot.
If someone has ever hit you with a length of steel pipe, it felt exactly like that. Pain just exploded through my chest, and I was pretty sure that I had cracked or broken a rib. I was mashed between the wall and the barrel of the drone’s gun, but that meant the drone couldn’t bring its weapon to bear. For a moment the barrel pushed hard against me, squeezing the breath from my chest as I fumbled with my machine pistol.
The drone’s AI realized that it would have to move to shoot me, so it skittered backwards along the ceiling, the turret on its back rotating. But the with barrel of the gun gone from my chest, I could lift my machine pistol.
I opened fire. The noise in the enclosed crawlway was immense. The bullets ripped down the side of the drone, punching through its metal shell and hammering into its guts before it managed to get any shots off. The drone shuddered and then went limp, falling from the ceiling with a clang. I put three more shots into it for good measure, but it didn’t move.
The smell of gun smoke and charred electronics filled the crawlway.
I took a deep breath, which hurt a lot. Something was flashing and wondered if I had somehow gotten a concussion in the process, and then realized that someone was texting me. I pulled my comm off my belt and saw that Corbin had sent me message consisting of a single question mark. I replied awkwardly—KILED DRNE—and then crawled past the dead machine, making my way down the passage. My chest felt tight with pain, and crawling wasn’t pleasant, but I managed it, forcing myself along.
The question. Did I dare continue, given that I had just alerted everyone in the engineering room below that someone was up here? I didn’t really have much choice, I realized, considering that my uncle and the others were about to storm the room. I had to gamble that the men below would assume the noise had been the drone doing its job.
I took a deep breath, asked every deity whose name I could remember and the nameless spirit of hyperspace to help me out, if they were so inclined, and continued crawling.
Soon I was over the engineering room.
Every few yards along the crawlway were access hatches that opened in the engineering room, both for maintenance and emergency escape from in case of a chemical leak or a hull breach or something. I brought up my phone again, connected to the security subsystem, and accessed the engineering room camera. As before, the image was terrible, and even worse on my phone’s little screen. Yet I could see that the commandos had set up an impromptu barricade by the doors, sheltering behind stacks of crates, and another group waited halfway across the room, ready to reinforce the men guarding the door. It was a reasonable defensive formation, and it meant the commandos were separated into two distinct groups.
So much for dropping a single grenade on their heads.
I crawled forward, counting off the distance in my head. I reached a point about halfway through the engineering room, and I switched my gun’s safety back on and holstered it. I pulled out four stun grenades and set the timers on each grenade to four seconds. Then I checked to make sure that I could hold two grenades in one hand
The timing was going to be everything.
I dug out my multitool and undid the release on the nearest hatch. I took a deep breath, gripped the handle, and pushed, sending the hatch swinging downward on its hinges. It swung in silence, thank Go
d. About eight meters below me I saw the engineering room, lights flashing on the various system consoles. There were quite a lot of red lights. The system was evidently not happy that Corbin had taken the regulator’s CPU.
I could also see the commandos waiting for Corbin’s attack. Fortunately, none of them had looked up just yet. Any minute one of them would happen to notice the opened hatch in the ceiling, and I had to be moving by then. I returned the multitool to my belt and took a deep breath to calm myself, which was probably a bad idea because it sent a wave of pain through me.
Now or never.
I withdrew, seized two grenades in each hand, leaned over the edge of the hatch, and threw them. The grenades in my left hand I threw towards the commandos guarding the door. The grenades in my right hand I flung towards the men waiting in reserve.
The movement caught one man’s attention, and he looked up and shouted a warning, his Tanith-Mordecai K7 snapping towards me.
I threw myself backwards just as a volley of automatic fire ripped up through the hatch. The bullets missed me and tore into the ceiling, bits of insulation from the pipes and the wiring falling onto the grillwork. The floor shivered beneath me as the bullets struck the metal, and rows of sharp bumps appeared all around me. The metal was strong enough to cause the rounds to fragment, but only just, and if one of the commandos had the bright idea of firing a laser at me, I was finished.
Then the stun grenades went off.
A brilliant flash of light blazed through the opened hatch, and even from this height I felt the vibration shoot through the metal. Then the shooting began in earnes, accompanied by the sounds of men screaming in rage and terror and agony. I crawled back towards the opened hatch and peered into the engineering room. It was all smoke and chaos, with the muzzle flashes of weapons visible in the gloom, and there was enough smoke that I could see the beams of the burst laser pistols.
A commando ducked for cover behind the console dedicated to managing the ion thrusters. It gave him excellent cover from the doors, but terrible cover from my position, so I lined up my pistol, sighted along the end, and pulled the trigger. Even with my sub-standard gun skills, I hit him in the helmet, and his head jerked before he slumped to the ground. Another commando noticed, looked up, and started to take aim at me, but before he pulled the trigger, a laser burst hit him in the chest and he spun.